


Athanasia

by kyrilu



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Canonical Character Death, Community: 007kinkmeme, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, References to Suicide, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-01
Updated: 2013-04-01
Packaged: 2017-12-07 03:45:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/pseuds/kyrilu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“No,” Q says, a smile curving on his mouth. “No, not at all. You see, Mr. Bond, I’ve been twenty-seven for quite a while."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Athanasia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/gifts).



> Many thanks to overacardboardsea for beta'ing.
> 
> pprfaith -- I'm so, so sorry it took this long. 
> 
> (It's a bit of a sneak crossover with the 2008 movie _Hancock_. I played fast and loose with the concept of immortality.)

1.

M is the first person who realises what he is. Bond supposes that she was watching CCTV closely, and she caught the moment when the bullet sunk into his heart. It was the perfect shot, and he’s knocked clear off his feet, coughing and hacking, but then he emerges, as if the bullet had never touched him. Recovery takes him two minutes; a gasp, and he’s alive. The bullet clatters out of his chest, falling to the floor with a clink.

He feels dizzy, but he’s used to this. With shaky fingers, he picks up his gun and starts firing.

Once he’s finished, M asks him, over the comm, if she can have a word with him.

He says, “Yes, ma’am.” He wipes his bloody nose on his suit sleeve. Then he walks to his car, swinging a rifle in his arms to an unsung song in the air.

 

2.

He makes sure that the door is closed behind him before she speaks. He’s changed into a fresh suit, a loaded gun in its holster, and if you looked closely at him, he is subtly grim. Bond is not Agent 007 yet. He is still a month away from making his two kills and earning rank. But it’s expected of him -- he knows he’s slowly becoming M’s favourite, that she is commissioning him for missions of her choosing.

“Take a seat, Bond,” M says. She gestures to a chair before her desk.

He sits, rustling into the seat, holding onto his composure. “What is it you wanted to say to me, ma’am?”

“You can cut the social niceties,” M says, and Bond’s slightly taken aback by her bluntness, which he comes to appreciate over time but not quite yet. “Mr. Bond, I would say that there is something...unusual about you, is that right?”

“Yes,” he says. His head dips forward in a nod.

“You aren’t the first,” she says after a pause. “There was somebody like you. He was a double-O.”

“Was?” Bond asks.

M’s expression is drawn. Tight, taut, like a rope, like knots, and Bond knows knots -- sailors’ knots from his time in the Royal Navy -- and his fingers twitch because there’s something _tangled_ about all this. She says, “It’s a long story, Bond, and rather unnecessary to tell of it. But he was like you.”

“He died,” Bond says. _Was._

“Yes,” she says. “Nobody besides myself knew about his, ah, _condition_. I let him go on a mission trusting that he’d survive. But he didn’t return.” She doesn’t look at Bond, merely taps her fingertips on her desk, spelling out indecipherable patterns.

Bond’s shoulders slump forward, and his hands curl over the edge of the desk. “Ma’am. That’s not possible. I’ve always come back. No matter how many times I went.”

“Yes, I thought so, too,” M says, and stops, pulling her hands onto her back, her eyes thoughtful. “Be careful, Mr. Bond. I will not report to anybody regarding your state; it makes you an asset to MI6, and I needn’t our research branch nosing about you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Bond says stiffly. He stands to go, the image of M’s blue eyes -- probing, intent -- seared gently into his mind.

“Hold on,” she says. “Mr. Bond. I trust that you will earn double-O rank in due time.”

Bond hides the brief flash of a smile.

“However,” she goes on, “like I said: _be careful_. I hear you nearly botched the last mission due to too much involvement with the target’s wife.”

“Girlfriend,” Bond corrects, which M ignores.

“I can’t stop you from whatever detours you might take during your missions,” M says. “But please recognise that you are susceptible. Recall what I told you about your so-called undying predecessor.”

Bond lets himself smile this time, stopping by the door. “I’ll remember,” he says to M. He clasps his hands around the door knob, pulls it shut. He considers bringing up the ugly bulldog on M’s desk, but, he decides, he’ll save the complaints once he becomes a double-O.

 

3.

Every time he dies, he wonders if it’s the last, M’s words ringing in his ears. He fights as hard as he can, and he always come back once he’s gone.

 

4.

Vesper is the second person who finds out what he is. He gets shot multiple times on the hotel stairway, and she’s staring at him, wide-eyed, when he lugs himself upward, blood soaking the white of his shirt. “Later,” he says to her in a low rumble. “ _Go_.”

He finds her huddled in the shower trying to scrub invisible blood off her hands.

She looks at him, at the water soaking both of them. “You’re all wet.”

Bond says, “ _Shh_ ,” and fits his mouth around her fingers. He’s never known anyone like her, and he sits there, against her, on the cold tile of the shower, water streaming, and streaming, and streaming, and streaming, and he’s breathless in that one moment.

He tells her about his apparent deathlessness when they’re toweling off, shivering almost in tandem.

This is Vesper Lynd. He meets her in a train, where she makes damning deductions toward him like Sherlock bloody Holmes and then comments on his arse. He names a drink after her: gin, vodka, Kina Lillet, a lemon peel hanging off the glass, because that’s like her, seemingly sour on the edges.

He carries her with him for a long time, but finally leaves her behind in Russia, in the snow.

 

5.

Q is number three. Third time’s the charm, Bond thinks. Q’d studied footage, combed the CCTV shot of what happened over the waterfall, and then, easy as anything, sidles up to Bond when he’s exercising and says, “You can’t die.”

Bond’s arms freeze in mid-air, fists holding up a pair of weights. “Did M tell you?” he says eventually, setting the weights down onto the ground. The lines of his muscles are still tightly drawn from the tension, and he reaches to lean against an adjacent wall, sweat lightly dampening from his face.

“No,” Q says, a smile curving on his mouth. “No, not at all. You see, Mr. Bond, I’ve been twenty-seven for quite a while. And there was once an unfortunate incident involving a contracted assassin raging into my flat.” He rakes slender fingers through his hair, and he’s so impossibly young, but he’s not.

“You can’t die, either,” Bond says, spelling out the syllables as if they’re entirely new to him. “Ah. I’ve only heard of one person besides myself.”

“Technically, we can die,” Q says, almost amicably, and he joins Bond, settling against the wall so that they’re side by side. “I’ve done research, 007. There’s only a handful of individuals like us in existence. Across ancient mythology and fairy tales there’s been some sort of evidence,” and here, Q waves a hand, “but much of it is obscured in fantasy and romanticisation, I’m afraid.”

“M’s double-O. The man I mentioned. He’s dead.” Bond’s long given up searching for a plausible explanation pertaining this damned immortality, to be quite honest. He’d rather know the technicalities, the limitations, than a vague, diluted history.

“Right.”

“How is that possible?” Bond says. “Is there some...Achilles’ heel or weak spot? Because I’m certain that I’ve been killed in an innumerable amount of ways, and I’ve yet to kick the bucket. And I age,” he adds wryly.

Q lets out a half-laugh. “Yes, I’ve noticed. I’ve come up with several theories, but I’m not quite sure about any of them. It’s rather complicated.”

“I can understand complicated,” Bond says with a shrug of his shoulders. “Well, Quartermaster?”

Q pushes up his glasses, examining Bond coolly. Bond meets his gaze without flinching. “Do be cautious who you associate with, Mr. Bond. It’s all a matter of proximity.”

Then Q’s fingertips move down to Bond’s chest. “Agent Eve Moneypenny,” Q recites out loud. And Q’s head tilts to the side while he brushes his hand over the wound, searching. “She’s one of us.”

 

6.

Eve is the fourth. They meet on the roof, where Q sent the both of them, but the man himself is nowhere to be seen.

“He’s afraid of heights,” Eve says with a laugh. “Looks like he trusts me to fill you in with the details, Mr. Bond. And don’t worry, I don’t have a weapon this time, despite the fact that we’re in a high place again.”

“All right. I’m listening.” Bond waits expectantly, and he subconsciously stares down at his chest, but he has no grudges over this one; he knows that it was a close shot, and he’s accustomed to near-death experiences...

Eve says, “The moment I put the bullet in you, I started running.”

“I don’t understand,” Bond says, blinking once, twice.

“I had a feeling that you were one of us,” Eve says. “We make each other vulnerable, weaker, you know. Dunno how many metres we actually have to be, but. You were probably closest to death than what you’ve ever been before, Bond -- when you can’t come back from death. Not a good idea to have people like us together.”

Bond tries to bring the feeling of fluttering darkness back into his mind. Drowning, shot, almost _dead._ Minutes passing and going out, out, out, but then he was making his way up. Then he was breaking through water.

“It stings like a bitch, doesn’t it?” Eve says, reading his thoughts. “Last time for us, I had to hightail it out of the city when Q texted me about a contracted arsehole of an assassin who stabbed him.”

“You’re still staying near him.”

“We’ve been sticking together for years,” Eve says. “Traveling here and there. We haven’t been in London until recently. MI6 gives me out-of-country missions, where I just contact Q via communicator -- I’m usually far enough.”

“Why doesn’t Q age?” Bond asks.

“Yeah, that,” Eve says. “He could age, if he had the opportunity. Do you remember the times when you’re shot, but you come back? Or just die in general, but you always come back? That ages us. The whole process. We’ve had rougher lives than comfortable little Q, who doesn’t know how to handle a gun.” She pauses. “He looked several years younger, actually, until that assassination attempt.”

Bond says, “You protect him.” _You don’t show him how to use a gun._

“We protect each other,” Eve says, and she says this fiercely. “Mr. Bond, you owe me a favour for realising what you were at that last moment there. You would’ve died if I hadn’t taken off.”

“I would have,” he admits, warily, because it’s the truth.

“Then know how dangerous you are to the both of us. Q and I didn’t expect you. We didn’t know there would be another.” She grins at him, wide, showing her his smile. “If I think you’re going to be an unnecessary complication, then I’ll personally hold your hand while you die.”

“I’m not going to attack my co-workers,” he says, although he knows that’s not the point. It’s what Q said: _proximity._ If he were to be shot fatally right now, with his current distance to Eve and Q, it would be the end. Same goes for them.

“We’ll have to deal with all this later,” Eve says, with a sharp shake of her head. “For now, we have to deal with the current problem at hand. With whoever blew up MI6. But you have my warning.”

“Loud and clear, Moneypenny,” Bond says, and he holds out his hand. Shake on it.

She doesn’t reciprocate, but she locks her gaze with his before she turns to leave, steady and, Bond, thinks, slightly _amused._

Well. It’s a good start.

 

7.

He feels the blade on the side of his face, the heat in the air palpable between them, and he waits for her to take the warmth and shift it against his skin with her fingers and her mouth. But all she does is drag the metaphor out -- _old dog, new tricks_ \-- and pulls away. She smiles at him warmly, and Bond knows that despite her threats, she rather likes him.

He returns her smile. “See you in the morning, then?”

“I’ll be seeing you,” she says.

 

8.

 _Cave canem_ , she says to him later, before he goes on his next mission after the events at Skyfall. He laughs and says, _I didn’t realise we were still on this. The last animal I was compared to was a rat._

 

9.

Rat.

Silva is the fifth and the last, and he doesn’t know until it’s too late.

Raoul Silva. Tiago Rodriguez. If a therapist had bothered to ask Bond about him, he would say, _Rather big hands, don’t you think?_ gripping his thighs to prove his point. As if Bond’s some bloody blushing virgin or something.

And then he thinks: Severine, and like the others, she’s dead, dead, at his feet. _Et c’est l’amour,_ the loudspeakers say. _Qui s'éveille._

She wasn’t his. None of them were bound to him in any way.

( _Vesper_ , the water says.)

She was-- beautiful, as all of them were beautiful.

 

10.

On the ride back to MI6, in the helicopter, Bond shackles Silva to a seat. He smirks at Silva, enjoying the role reversal with a certain amount of relish, and Silva merely stares at him blandly in return. “Comfortable?” Bond says.

“A radio,” Silva says. “So Q-branch has been shaping up lately.”

“New Quartermaster.”

“The old Q’s gone,” Silva murmurs, although he doesn’t sound too surprised. “He was a pathetic fool. I was better than him in the old days, James. M knew that, of course.” A shrug of his shoulders; a little movement that’s barely visible, due to his constraints.

“Are you going to stop dropping cryptic hints about the past and actually tell me what happened?” Bond drawls, unable to help himself. “We don’t have all day.”

Silva shrugs again.

They stare at each other. Silva’s eyes are pitch black, dark, and Bond wonders if it’s his own blue eyes, there, reflected in the pupils. A patch of something lighter.

“Severine was afraid of you,” Bond says.

“That was quite wise of her.”

“Oh?”

“I cannot die,” Silva says with a unfathomable smile.

 

11.

They put Silva in the glass, and Silva laughs, and says, “I suppose that you thought it a joke, darling, but I am stronger than you think.”

“Who's the one in the cage, then?” Bond says.

Silva merely smiles, angles his head upward, leaving Bond to turn away and face the shadows. It looks almost like Silva is praying -- waiting.

The door opens. M enters.

 

12.

“It’s him, isn’t he,” Bond says after M says _Tiago Rodriguez_ in a single hurried breath. It isn’t a question.

“Yes,” M says. Her hands are in fists, which looks ludicrous at first glance, an elderly woman with her hands curled and prepared to strike. But you look again, and it’s M.

Bond only nods, entering into Q-branch, a submersion of bright blinking screens and the echoing sound of typing.

Silva plays them for fools -- the doors open. Bond runs. Runs and runs and runs, bringing M with him. He’s at his old home once again, with its dusty doors and hidden tunnels and old secrets passed along to M.

 _Look how young we pretend to be_ , he doesn’t think.

 

13.

He had thought M would live forever like him.

 

14.

On the roof, Eve gives Bond what M has bequeathed to him, that single ridiculous _dog._ Bond holds the box in his hands and asks Eve, “Do you think -- if I ask, will you--” _I’ll personally hold your hand while you die_ \-- “Stop running,” he finally settles on. He closes the lid on the box. “You and Q. Can you -- please.”

He looks at her carefully, studying the shadows of her face. Her mouth is tight, her forehead drawn -- she’s staring at Bond like he asked her to move the moon for him.

“James,” she says.

“No, not yet,” he says, forcing a laugh. “No, I don’t think so. There’s still...”

“Yeah,” Eve says quietly. “Tell me later.”

(The ghosts are there, in the water. There’s an ocean in the box M gave him, swirling with a shared and distant past. There’s bodies in the ocean. Vesper, Mathis, Fields, Ronson, Severine, Silva, M. Bond is drowning, dying, living. It doesn’t stop, except when it does.)

He reaches for Eve’s hand.

Tomorrow, they’ll coax Q to the roof and laugh at the way he closes his eyes at the sight of the ground below, but keep hold of his elbows anyway. Tomorrow, they’ll talk; Eve and Q will watch Bond burn the box, the china bulldog, the ocean, and they’ll proclaim this era a beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> The original prompt is [here](http://007kinkmeme.livejournal.com/1142.html?thread=40822#t40822).


End file.
